


In the Midst of This War

by TheJediCode



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003) - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Childhood, Explosions, Friendship, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Platonic Relationships, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:35:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24887713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheJediCode/pseuds/TheJediCode
Summary: Ahsoka is so different from Rex, from all of the clones really. Yet they all share something in common: war. Their lives are a constant fight, one that has denied them their childhoods. Maybe, just maybe, they can still make one for themselves in the midst of this war.(Platonic Pairing)
Relationships: CT-7567 | Rex & Ahsoka Tano, CT-7567 | Rex/Ahsoka Tano
Comments: 3
Kudos: 35





	1. In the Heat of Battle

Ahsoka breathed in deeply, centering herself by focusing not on the chaos ensuing all around her but the familiar sounds and smells of the battlefield. The sound of blaster fire echoed in her head, along with the barked orders of clone troopers and the hum of lightsabers. The smell of burnt ozone grounded her, but the all too familiar scents of blood and scorched plastoid stung her brain. The brief pause, just a single breath, was meant to calm her, to reattune her to the Force, but the effect was quite the opposite. 

Despite spending her time in a constant state of warfare, Ahsoka still wasn’t used to all the death and destruction. Maybe that was for the best, though. When she got used to it, that would mean she had stopped caring. The lives lost all around her would stop mattering. She couldn’t allow that to happen.

She snapped back to attention at the sound of a body falling to the ground beside her with a soft thud. She stepped over the armored corpse, not even looking down to see who dropped before charging forward, using her sabers to deflect bolts from enemy blasters. Maybe she was becoming more desensitized to the endless death and killing than she had initially thought.

It wasn’t fair. The enemy was a horde of droids. They didn’t bleed, didn’t die, didn’t cry out in agony as they were hauled off the battlefield by their comrades. They sparked and broke, but a droid’s end wasn’t the same as that of a Jedi or a clone. She had heard the tortured groans of dying men far too many times, and she was too accustomed to the feeling of being covered in someone else’s blood.

It was easy for her to forget that she was just a kid when she felt like she had lived a thousand lives. When she did remember, though, all she could think about was the fact that other kids didn’t have that problem. Then she would think of Rex; he was just a kid too. All of the clones – they were still just children. Sure, they looked like grown men, but that didn’t change the fact that most of them were barely over ten years old. She was older than they were – a child leading children.

Once again, she was shocked back into reality by the battle raging around her. This time it wasn’t the thud of a falling corpse that caught her attention. No, instead it was the blast of an explosion ripping through the battlefield that brought back her focus, but not soon enough to stop the shockwave from throwing her to the ground. Suddenly, someone was helping her up from the ground, but there was too much smoke in the air to see who it was. 

“Commander, are you alright?”

Ahsoka grinned, recognizing the voice immediately. She could tell all of them apart. Their voices sounded the same at first, but there were so many variations in tone, mannerism, and choice of words that she could tell in a heartbeat. “Never better, Rex.”

“In that case, I think you’ll be needing this,” the captain said, handing her a lightsaber she hadn’t even realized she had dropped during her fall.

“Thanks,” she remarked, looking ahead and preparing to reenter the fight. “What would I do without you?”

“Die, probably,” Rex replied, a bit too solemnly to tell if it was a joke or not.

Ahsoka could hear the droid army approaching ahead, already regrouped from the explosion and unphased by the flames that now ravaged the field of battle. All around her, clones were getting back to their feet after being knocked down by the same shockwave that had affected her. 

“Then don’t stray too far, okay,” she told him. “I need to stay alive until we make it to the rendezvous point.” She couldn’t see his face under the helmet, but she knew he was smirking.

“Whatever you say, Commander.”

The only thing left to do was fight. She raised her sabers and surveyed the battlefield.

Then the next charge exploded – much closer this time – and everything went dark..


	2. In the Mirror That Betrays Me

“Is she going to be okay, Kix?”

“She’ll be fine,” the medic said with a casual wave of his hand. “When the adrenaline stopped pumping, her body went into mild shock from the explosion. She’ll be a little sore and bruised, but it’s nothing she can’t handle. Commander Tano’s a tough one.”

“Right.” Rex spoke his agreement more heartily than he felt it. He looked down at the Ahsoka’s still form lying on a gurney. “She looks like she isn’t exactly conscious.”

“She’s sedated right now,” Kix explained. “She’ll probably be up soon, but she needs whatever rest she can get.”

“Would it be possible to move her to her shipboard quarters?” Rex asked, uneasy about the thought of her spending the night in the medbay – not that he hadn’t spent his own fair share of rotations recovering from injuries there. 

“If you want to, go ahead. I can’t help you with it, though. I’ve got to check back in on the rest of the injured _vode_. That explosion caused some serious damage.”

Rex clapped Kix on the back. “I’ll take care of it.”

He slipped an arm under the commander’s shoulder and lifted her up from the bed. She muttered something groggy and indecipherable as he stood her up on her feet and wrapped an arm around her waist to hold her upright. She mumbled something else he didn’t understand.

“You don’t have to walk if you can’t,” Rex informed her gently. “I can carry you if you need me to.”

Finally, something coherent came out of her mouth, though it was slow and incredibly slurred. “I know how to walk.” The words were accompanied by an elbow to Rex’s ribs, which was weaker and much more poorly aimed than it normally would have been. “I don’t need you to carry me.”

“Okay then.”

He might as well have carried her for all the support he had to provide. He was holding up almost the entirety of her weight (not that she was particularly heavy). She was staggering too much to move much on her own. Kix hadn’t been joking about the strength of the painkillers.

“Hey, Rex,” she said dazedly.

He looked down at her. “Yes, Commander?”

“Do you ever wonder what it would have been like to be a kid?”

“What do you mean?”

“You never got to be a kid, did you?”

“Of course I did. I may have been created in a lab, but I didn’t just appear out of nowhere fully-grown.”

“But not, like, _a kid_ ,” she stressed, staggering and leaning a little more into Rex’s side.

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking.”

“It’s okay.” She patted his arm sympathetically. “I didn’t get to be one either.”

Rex didn’t know how to respond to that, but he finally understood what she had been asking. He really hadn’t been a kid. There had only ever been training and preparing. His purpose was to be a solider, and anything that didn’t contribute to the achievement of that purpose was pointless, wasn’t it? At the end of the day, it didn’t matter much that he hadn’t experienced a traditional childhood. That wouldn’t have made him a better warrior.

“What was it like?”

He didn’t answer, partially because he wasn’t sure what she was asking and partially because he was struggling to help her walk without dragging her. She was carrying less and less of her own weight. Ahsoka wasn’t heavy, but it was hard to carry someone whose limbs were almost completely limp.

“Here you go,” he said, letting go of her outside the door of her quarters. He scooped her back up as she staggered and almost fell. “Careful.” 

She stared blankly at the door for a long moment until Rex asked, “Do you need me to open it for you?”

Ahsoka nodded.

Rex opened the door, realizing how much Ahsoka must have hated the situation she was in. She was normally so independent, but now she was helpless. If she were in her right mind, she would have been furious that he was dragging her around like a doll. He wondered if she would even remember this in the morning. He didn’t think she would, and the thought saddened him. Rex didn’t want her to miss out on a single moment of her life. His own days were passing too rapidly. 

After making sure Ahsoka made it into her quarters, Rex found himself standing in front of a mirror the refresher by the soldiers’ barracks, staring blankly at his reflection. When had he gotten this old? Sure, he still looked young, but that didn’t negate the fact that he looked twice as old as he actually was. At twelve years old, he should have looked like a child. Instead, every physical feature betrayed him as a grown man. He knew it wouldn’t feel right to look like a child, though. No, he had been through too much to ever see himself that way. He had too much life experience. He felt so _old._ He had never stopped to consider what a clone’s expiration date might be. Was it thirty? Forty? How long could he expect to live, assuming the war didn’t kill him first?

If he lived that long, what would happen to him when the war ended? He tried to imagine himself settling down and starting a family. As much as the idea appealed to him in a vague sort of way, it felt so impossible, so ridiculous. Would he even be allowed to have a life of his own, or would he be transferred into some other realm of service to the Republic? Would the clones become a police force? Maybe they would be tasked with patrolling the galaxy and taking down smugglers and crime syndicates. That seemed plausible. Each new idea Rex came up with, though, seemed like a futile attempt to distract himself from the thought lurking at the back of his mind.

What if they were decommissioned?

He tried to shake it off as an impossibility, but the idea wouldn’t stop nagging at him. There was no good reason for Rex and his brothers to be decommissioned. Then again, there was really no good reason for them not to be. What was stopping anyone from tossing them all out when the war was over? There wasn’t a moral question about raising hordes of clones for slaughter in battle, so why would it matter what happened to them when the fighting was over.

Suddenly, Rex didn’t feel so old anymore. He felt young and small and… fearful. Captains in the GAR weren’t supposed to be fearful. They were made to be more resilient than that. And yet he felt like a child facing an uncertain future. Although, as Ahsoka had pointed out, maybe he wasn’t entirely sure what that felt like.

With a final grimace at his misrepresentative reflection, Rex retired to the barracks, knowing sleep would not come easy that night.


End file.
